religion

Last week the North Country This Week paper published a front page headline story about the Democratic candidate for DA in St. Lawrence County. The headline read: “DA hopeful will not confirm post”.

The paper had received a screenshot of Facebook posts that had allegedly been posted to one Valerie Ann Viers-DeMaio’s Facebook page the day after the Presidential election last November. Here’s the screenshot as I found it on the paper’s website, NorthContryNow.com:

On one hand, the screenshot looks fake. Those are not Facebook fonts or text and image alignments. Facebook comments also have a shaded background and the order of the comment meta line should be: “Like • Reply • [time-stamp]”, not “[time-stamp] • Like”.

So to me, the screenshot reeks of the kind of mistakes email spammers make when they send you an email purporting to be from PayPal or Bank of America, where things are just enough “off” to let you know it’s probably not legit. The article’s author, Jimmy Lawton, doesn’t go into whether and how he verified the screenshot. I wish he had. All we know is “DeMaio says she reported the incident to Facebook after it occurred and it was later removed.” So I guess, except for this screenshot, the evidence is gone.

On looking at the metadata attached to the image I downloaded from the paper, I find the following:

So the image posted on the paper’s website was created in Adobe Photoshop CS6. If the image were a screenshot, as is claimed, I’d expect to find image metadata like this:

But what we don’t know (we could ask the paper) is whether they posted what they were given, or whether it’s the paper’s own image generated in Photoshop by the news room from the originals. If this is the original then the Photoshop creation stamp rather than a screenshot app stamp of some sort makes me think this is a hoax from a Trump supporter sabotaging the election. And, if so, it likely worked.

On the other hand, Monroe is not denying having made the statements. He’s just saying he doesn’t recall writing it and can’t find the comment on his Facebook feed. Instead he makes apologies to anyone it may have offended. It’s the kind of response that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

If he really doesn’t share the sentiment of the reported posts to the point where he can be certain he didn’t write something along the same line as what was reported, why can’t he say so? Wanting to appear to take the high ground by making an apology for something he’s not sure he’s done was a lousy campaign decision. He could have taken the high ground by simply denying it.

“No, I didn’t write that. I don’t think that. I would never in a thousand years say that, and if she has real evidence, and can show you the actual Facebook entry that I did, she should produce it. Now let’s move on.” That would have been much more convincing.

What to do? The screenshot, to a geek like me, looks really, really fake. But the candidate isn’t saying it’s not – rather, in essence, “It might have happened” – which is the kind of response my teenager has taught me to be very suspicious of.

How should I vote on Tuesday? I’m thinking a last minute write-in candidacy might be in order. Of course, I don’t have any qualifications for being a DA. But then again, neither does the person who has had that job for the past few years.

Addendum:

A little more hunting around, and I found this quote from Ms. DeMaio-Viers to the Ogdensburg Journal:

“He knows he wrote it, because that is his handwriting,” Mrs. DeMaio-Viers said when asked about the nature of the font. “Those screenshots are valid. They are true and that is what he did. That’s what he said and that is what he wrote on my page.”

So, that about clinches it. Anyone who thinks that Facebook comments appear in someone’s own handwriting… well, there’s dumb and dumber.

I’m not sure how otherwise legitimate news agencies would give it a second thought as newsworthy, or why Monroe’s campaign didn’t respond more effectively to something so easily discredited. So now the question is whether he’s able to discern what is good or bad evidence. One wonders whether he’s any more qualified than I am for the position.

In seminary — 30 years ago, in seminary — we were required to learn about the great church councils. The early church councils, Nicaea (1st and 2nd), Constantinople (1st, 2nd and 3rd), and Chalcedon were convened by various Roman emperors between 325 and 787 in order to agree on the “correct” faith of the church. Each of them came in response to some question or another about doctrine, and each of them settled the questions by deciding what was “true” and what wasn’t. What wasn’t was labeled “heresy”, and those who insisted on continuing with believing those things were excommunicated, cast out.

Back in those “good old days”, those who lost the debates were hunted down and eliminated. The councils were called by the emperor. Their decisions carried the weight of law, enforced by imperial armies.

The last of those councils, Nicaea 2, ended 1330 years ago last week (October 23, 787). It declared, basically, that people who destroy icons (sacred symbols) were to be hunted down and wiped out.

None of the heresies ever really died out. They just went underground for a while and assumed other names. The Boy Scouts are a perfect example of Pelagianism, alive and well in America (not that any Boy Scout I’ve ever met knew squat about Pelagius).

That’s because most people in the 3rd millennium know or care about 1st millennium Roman imperial politics. And yet, the church — even the “Main Line” Protestant churches — still insists on measuring the qualifications for ordination by whether someone conforms to doctrines like “Jesus Christ: two persons, one substance” and the Nicaean (325 version) declaration about the trinity.

None of this has anything to do with the New Testament. The Bible says nothing about the trinity, nor does it care much about the metaphysics of Jesus. (There is Luke’s story about Jesus’ birth, which is a story, not a thesis on ontology. And there is John’s Jesus talking about “I am in the Father…”, which is a call to action, not a propositional statement.)

My saying that makes me guilty of plenty of heresies. Perhaps all of them.

What modern Christianity needs, though, is less believing and more knowing. There are some things about Jesus that we can know from the Bible. None of them conform to the kind of religion Mike Pence wants us all to declare our national allegiance to.

The Bible’s Jesus was an iconoclast. He fed hungry people. He took care of children. He turned over the tables in the stock exchange. He questioned authority. He made the fundamentalists who had sold out to the enemy of his day so angry they killed him. None of it has to do with making up rules about who can and can’t belong. It has everything to do with taking care of one another, taking care of your community, and taking care of the world we live in.

If the church acted on what we can know about Jesus rather than hiding behind what the imperialists of 2 millennia ago made up about him, there might be a good reason to go there on Sundays.